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Comment by blahgeek | Hacker News Reader

> could have been a 10 Megabyte TUI app

Wow, in a world dominated by gigabytes of electron application, people thinks 10 MB is the optimal size for a simple utility TUI app.

As a reference, (from archlinux repo), vim’s install package is 2.3MB, curl is 1.2MB, lua (the complete language interpreter) is 362KB

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To be fair, Vim and Curl are almost certainly dynamically linked, so they get to "cheat" a little. 10 megs is entirely reasonable for a statically linked utility intended to "just work" when you dump it somewhere in your $PATH.

Take the Micro editor. It's written in Go, and packs a fair bit of functionality into a single 12 meg static binary (of which a few megs is probably the runtime.)

640K ought to be enough for anyone.

Indeed. It is the enigma of success in an industry with no franchise value.

- Bill Gates.

And:

The world does not need more than 4 computers.

-Ken Olsen, or someone (in the mainframe days).

(Both are alleged / apocryphal quotes. :)

I believe the Ken Olson quote was that nobody needed a computer in their house, but that was a time where businesses were using terminal servers... it would have been interesting to see where that would have went, but we might be heading that way again since we own nothing and everything is a only a temporary license.

The second quote was "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers", and it's attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM saying it in 1943. The real quote is indeed from Watson, but in 1953, summarizing the sales projections of a specific model of machine, and noting that they actually sold 18 of them.

https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-real...

Gates denies ever saying anything like the 640K quote, but it was possibly someone at Microsoft being salty about the 640K limit that IBM had imposed on the PC through its design.

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